Was Bayonetta out at that time?
And you're forgetting DMC3 Dante did that attack in the Love Planet club on a pole like a dancer, so who's copying who:troll: Dante did it first, then Bayonetta copied it.
Wait...
In the previews, it showed Bayonetta dancing around in confetti. This was way before the game came out, when it was scheduled to be released in 2009, but got held back.
Anyway, Dante's pole play extended combo possibilities, imho -- especially when playing while in Trickster mode.
The quality of this vid is really bad. And while you can't change it, you can still make out what's going on onscreen.
Anyway, getting back to DMC4; they took out pole play and wallrun, therefore insuring you can never pull off combos quite like that ever again. It was a heavy loss for me. And it should have been for other players, but I guess they'll just say that those moves were never needed in the first place, which is a shame.
So, back to DMC3:
This was a time when they were retconning DMC3 to DMC1. They had to have a wilder version of Dante, to emphasize how much younger (and arguably more immature) he was.
Also, because this is Capcom, and they don't know the meaning of the word subtlety... not even if Mercury Steam showed them how to do it themselves (LoS arguably has one of the better stories in an action game, imho).
So yeah. Old Dante. Let's worship everything he does, even if it means giving up certain moves later on in the series.